Milton Reynolds is a Senior Program Associate with Facing History and Ourselves. Before joining Facing History he spent over ten years as a middle school teacher, a diversity/communications consultant and as a curriculum design specialist and has over 25 years of counseling experience. Dedicated to improving dialogue and implementing innovative solutions to address difficult social issues such as race relations and juvenile justice and delinquency concerns, Milton sustains a high level of engagement in his home community. In addition to serving as the Vice Chair of the San Mateo Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Commission, he also is the former Governing Board Chair for LEJ (Literacy for Environmental Justice); a San Francisco based environmental justice/youth development non-profit. Milton is a long standing member on the advisory board of The Working Group, producers of the award winning Not In Our Town, PBS series.

Milton has a strong interest in understanding how the legacies of collective history manifest themselves in our present society and how the past informs our decision making processes and shapes institutional practices in the present. Over the past several years the American Eugenics Movement and its ideological legacies has become a subject of particular interest in Milton’s studies. In particular he has spent time examining how these ideas continue to shape educational and juvenile justice practices and policies.

As part of an internal research process at Facing History Milton explored the link between teacher efficacy and navigating issues of race in the classroom in order to raise new questions and catalyze a more robust internal conversation about the high rate of attrition amongst new teachers and possible organizational approaches to help curb this disturbing trend.

Milton also remains connected to the Stanford Integrated Schools Project where he has worked for the last several years with Dorothy Steele and Hazel Markus. His efforts there include data collection and collaboratively designing a series of in-services for educators, the goal of which is to share the research findings and model pedagogical practices that are consistent with the research findings in hopes of helping teachers develop a theoretical basis for their practice and to supplant more traditional approaches to teaching that are rooted in problematic notions about the nature of learning and what constitutes intellect.

Milton’s background includes such varied and divergent experiences as being a youth counselor, middle school teacher, service-learning coordinator, tour guide, stand up comedian, competitive bass fisherman, and a research associate at U.C. Berkeley and more recently at Stanford University. Milton received his B.A. with distinction in Sociology from San Jose State with a minor in Communications.

Organization Description(s):

Facing History and Ourselves delivers classroom strategies, resources and lessons that inspire young people to take responsibility for their world. Internationally recognized for our quality and effectiveness, Facing History harnesses the power of the Internet and partners with school systems, universities and ministries of education worldwide.
Each year we reach more than 1.9 million students through our global network of more than 28,000 trained educators, staff, adjunct faculty and international fellows facilitate hundreds of seminars and workshops annually, and we reach the public through community events and extensive online resources. In 2008, the Facing History and Ourselves website received more than 700,000 visits from people in 215 countries.

At the heart of our work is the resource book Facing History and Ourselves: Holocaust and Human Behavior, which explores the consequences of hatred. Students all over the world learn to recognize bigotry and indifference. They also meet exemplars of courage and compassion in the face of injustice and see that their own daily choices can have major impacts and perhaps even be a critical link to a safer future.

Facing History's work is based on the premise that we need to — and can— teach civic responsibility, tolerance, and social action to young people, as a way of fostering moral adulthood. If we do not educate students for dignity and equity, then we have failed both them and ourselves.

We believe that students are moral philosophers who are able and willing to think about tough moral and ethical dilemmas in surprisingly sophisticated ways. Our materials and our approach help students with a wide range of abilities and learning styles understand that their choices and actions matter, and that young people can, and should, be agents of change. We provide teachers with the tools they need to educate students so that they can act on their knowledge.

"I faced history one day and found myself." - Facing History and Ourselves Student